Customer Success Best Practices

04/04/2017By Sammy Abdullah, CFA

Recently we met a company called Ascendify. They have a world-class HR product that allows major enterprises with 10,000+ employees to manage talent for the entire life of the employee, from when they’re first being considered as a new hire to when they ultimately get promoted to top senior positions. Ascendify has phenomenal net revenue retention and never loses a customer. They’re also the most adept we’ve seen at upselling current customers. Below are key learnings on customer success from Ascendify:

-Frequent Contact is critical. The Company has weekly meetings with all of their big accounts. Smaller accounts may be contacted less frequently, but at least once a month. Contact is a personal email, phone call, or even an in person meeting. Email blasts are never done.

-Onboarding/Implementation. Every client goes through a 90 day implementation/role out, and customers are re-trained as necessary or as new employees come on. If your customers don’t know how to use the product or if they’re depending on existing employees to train new employees on your product, you will lose them.

-Get on a plane. When necessary, a senior exec at Ascendify will fly out to a client to help them with implementation or training. In person meetings are the best way to develop champions at a client and make sure there is wide adoption of your product at a client.

-Get your customers involved. Give customers some ownership of the product roadmap. Of course you need to know when to say “no”, but making sure the feedback of your best customers is implemented in new releases of your product goes a long way towards keeping them.